Museum's Hack Art Piece Pulled

Michelle Delio
05.15.02

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NEW YORK -- An art-hacking project at the New Museum of Contemporary Art was pulled offline last Friday in response to security concerns raised by the art.

Curators had described the museum's Open Source Art Hack show as a display of "hacking as an extreme art practice," but evidently one piece in the exhibit was a tad too extreme for the museum's Internet service provider.

Visitors to the museum could activate the scanner, which then looked for possible ways to penetrate a scanned site's network. The results were displayed by news tickers on a computer screen, as well as through strobe lights and sounds that corresponded to the findings of the scan.

In response to a complaint from one of the sites scanned by "Minds," the museum's ISP, Logicworks, notified the museum that the scanner could not continue to run over the museum's Internet connection, according to Lauren Tehan, head of public relations for the New Museum.

Port scanners are legitimately used by network administrators and security experts to examine networks. But scanners can also be used by malicious hackers to probe systems for weaknesses. Therefore, many ISPs, including Logicworks, ban the use of scanners over their services.

Knowbotic Research, a group of Swiss digital artists who created the "Minds" piece, said in a statement that pulling the plug on the scanner highlighted a point that they had hoped to make with their art.

"Security becomes the leading principle of today's politics; if you dare to go in this political mousetrap and discuss, crisscross, enact publicly in networks the concept of security, the law forces you immediately to obscure the topic," a statement posted on the group's website read, in part.

The group's statement also suggested it did not receive support from the museum or the show's curators in finding ways to keep the project online.

"We had hoped to raise these issues unobscured in an art museum, but since art institutions are unwilling to enter this zone, even or maybe especially not in an Art Hacking show, due to the ubiquitous paranoia and threat of getting sued, the museum and the curators made it very clear to us that we as artists are 100 percent alone in any legal dispute."

Tehan said that the museum has tried to find a way to keep the project online.

The museum has put up a website dedicated to following the debate about the fate of "Minds."